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Monday, August 30, 2010

Writing for somebody else

After almost a year of this yammering on Gastronommy, I’ve realized that I’ve forgotten that elsewhere you can’t just write about whatever suits your mood. On the other hand, as you know, professionally writing means you pitch your piece or you get assigned them.

It’s one thing to write about my journey through local Singaporean cuisine(s) for a casual blog with a majority of non-Singaporean readers, but it’s quite another when I have to hash out a piece on a particular local cuisine for local readers that I’m not necessarily well-versed in!  I’m learning a lot in the process, but there’s this undeniable nervousness I get whenever I open my Word document and stare at my notes, wondering how to weave it into an informative and inspiring read.  These articles (thankfully) aren’t about working off press releases, but with nothing to guide me with for these new topics, I dread not emphasizing the right bits of the cuisine and culture due to my relative novice experience with it.  I don’t want to end up writing only the obvious, or worse (and unlikely actually): factual errors!  Of course, my fantastic and patient editor would catch any such nonsense before it went out to print, but I’d still rather save her and everyone else that trouble.

Let's see how this September article turns out.